"Our first experience with climate and materials science applications showed that replacing one of the multi-core processors in the XC30 with an NVIDIA Tesla GPU boosts application performance and disproportionally reduced energy to solution," said Thomas Schulthess, professor at ETH Zurich and director of the Swiss National Supercomputing Center, which was one of the first Cray customers to order a hybrid Cray XC30 system. "This provides necessary proof of principle in favor of hybrid compute nodes as a promising solution to the energy challenges we face in supercomputing."
"We designed the Cray XC30 supercomputer to be the realization of our Adaptive Supercomputing vision, which is about providing customers with a powerful, flexible tool for solving a multidisciplinary array of computing challenges," said Peg Williams, Cray's senior vice president of high performance computing systems. "Integrating diverse accelerator and coprocessor technologies into our XC30 systems gives our customers a variety of processing options for their demanding computational needs. Equally as important, Cray XC30 supercomputers feature an innovative software environment that allows our customers to optimize their use of diverse processing options for their unique applications."
Leveraging years of successful production accelerator experience, adding the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors and NVIDIA Tesla GPU accelerators is a continuation of Cray's support for innovative hybrid supercomputing technologies. In addition to now being offered in both the Cray XC30 and Cray XC30-AC systems, Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors and NVIDIA Tesla GPU accelerators are also available in the Cray® CS300™ line of cluster supercomputers.
"The Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessor is designed for high-density computing and highly parallel processing while offering important efficiencies in programmability for the software developer community," said Rajeeb Hazra, Intel Vice President & General Manager, Technical Computing Group. "The performance and programmability of Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessors, along with the Intel® Xeon® processors, will enable a powerful and energy efficient Cray XC30 supercomputer that will be broadly applicable for scientists, engineers, and researchers in achieving their breakthrough innovations."
"From identifying new ways to battle HIV to enabling the design of safer buildings that better withstand large earthquakes, NVIDIA GPU accelerators are enabling researchers worldwide to advance discovery and innovation in all areas of science," said Sumit Gupta, general manager of Tesla Accelerated Computing at NVIDIA. "Combining Cray XC30 supercomputers with Tesla K20X GPUs, the world's highest performance accelerators, gives scientists and engineers unmatched computational horsepower and application support to overcome even the most difficult scientific challenges."
About the Cray XC30 supercomputers
Previously code-named "Cascade," the Cray XC30 supercomputers are Cray's most advanced HPC systems and are engineered to meet the performance challenges of today's HPC users. The Cray XC30 and Cray XC30-AC supercomputers feature the unique Aries system interconnect; a Dragonfly network topology that frees applications from locality constraints; innovative cooling systems to lower customers' total cost of ownership; the next-generation of the scalable, high performance Cray Linux Environment supporting a wide range of ISV applications; Cray's HPC optimized programming environment; and the ability to handle a wide variety of processor types.
Additional information on the Cray XC30 supercomputers can be found on the Cray website at www.cray.com.
About Cray Inc.
Global supercomputing leader Cray Inc. (
Cray is a registered trademark of Cray Inc. in the United States and other countries, and Cray® XC30™ and Cray® CS300™ are trademarks of Cray Inc. Other product and service names mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.
Cray Media: Nick Davis 206/701-2123 pr@cray.com Cray Investors: Paul Hiemstra 206/701-2044 ir@cray.com
